Edge-based Refactored EPC for High Speed Mobility

Abstract

The current design of LTE is to deploy the EPC components in a core network, and the data traffic from UEs (User Equipment) is converged to these components. It will cause network congestion and inefficiencies with the increasing number of internet devices in the future. One distributed way to solve the network burden is to deploy the on demand EPC components close to the edge of network (near the base station; known as Edge-based EPC). At present, some researches directly use the current EPC components for edge deployment. However, it causes some problems. When a UE moves between two edge networks, it will face the inter-edge procedures to change of these serving edge components. The procedure involves many numbers of message exchanges between components for the re-establishment of the connection, which will affect the UE's experience. It represents that the current EPC architecture is not suitable for edge deployment. Based on our previous study, we had derived a Refactored EPC (R-EPC) architecture [1]. Then, we determine the deployment of the R-EPC components based on their responsibilities and call this architecture edge-based refactored EPC (abbreviated to E-R-EPC). In E-R-EPC, we deploy the common use of service triggering related components and the gateway responsible for data traffic to edge network, while deploying the components that record the location of UE to core network; thus, the UE can use the low-latency data traffic services in edge network, since the served recording location components are not changed, it can reduce the signaling cost to update the location information. Also, we propose a new handover procedure called inter-edge handover. Further, we compare the signaling cost and queuing delay of E-R-EPC with other architectures, the results of the proposed one showed good performance, especially in dealing with frequent movements of UE between two edge networks (e.g.: high-speed mobility); It proves E-R-EPC is a suitable reference for edge-designed networks.